Al Ries and Jack Trout introduced the term «positioning» in a series of articles for Advertising Age in the early 1970s and turned it into a book a decade later.
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The book that introduced the concept of positioning and changed the vocabulary of marketing. Ries and Trout argue that the commercial battle is fought not in the product but in the consumer's mind — saturated with messages and able to retain barely one idea per category. Hence their most counterintuitive advice: being first in a new category pays better than being better in an existing one. A 1980s text with dated examples, whose conceptual frame still explains why certain brands sustain prices their competitors cannot.
Al Ries and Jack Trout introduced the term «positioning» in a series of articles for Advertising Age in the early 1970s and turned it into a book a decade later. Their thesis changed the vocabulary of marketing and remains the reason to read it: the commercial battle is fought not in the product but in the consumer's mind, a space saturated with messages where barely one idea per category fits. From this follows the book's most counterintuitive advice: being first in a new category pays better than being better in an existing one, because the mind orders by arrival, not technical merit. The authors develop the consequences with examples now archaeological — Avis, 7-Up, Xerox — and with a deliberately blunt prose that sometimes mistakes assertion for demonstration. Read it knowing that. Its interest for anyone analysing companies is conceptual rather than tactical: it explains the mechanism by which a brand sustains pricing power, and pricing power is one of the few competitive moats that survive the cycles.
For readers wanting the conceptual origin of the brand as a competitive moat; less suited if dated examples and a dogmatic tone bother you.
FactThe concept first appeared in a 1972 series of articles for Advertising Age; the book followed in 1981, published by McGraw-Hill.
